London is so much more well kept than Paris for some reason. I went to Paris last year and the city was terrifyingly dirty, with layers of dirt struck on the walls of beautiful buildings, darkened by it. Stuff under construction was also mismanaged and often just poorly done. Scaffolding was very poorly done all around the city. After midnight I felt quite unsafe even in good neighbourhoods. I feel like London as a city is way better kept than Paris
"Terrifyingly dirty"? The simple way they clean the gutters with the fountains on the corners is amazing to me as an American.
Layers of dirt on beautiful buildings? They're several hundred years old.
Felt quite unsafe even in good neighborhoods? I spent all last week there, on foot, at all hours alone and never once felt unsafe. It occurs to me now that maybe that's my male privilege so apologies if that's not the case for you but Paris is the greatest city in the world as far as I'm concerned.
> "Terrifyingly dirty"? The simple way they clean the gutters with the fountains on the corners is amazing to me as an American.
As a Parisian, I can sadly attest that the city is currently disgustingly dirty, that it has been getting worse and worse in the five years since I moved there and that London is indeed a lot cleaner.
Paris suffers from a lot of incivilities, very lax policing, the current mayor puting cleanliness as a non priority and extremely poor supervision of the existing cleaning crews.
It has become such a pain point for Parisian that cleanliness is likely to be the main issue of next year electoral campaign.
I will never forget when I visited Paris as a tourist and in the green patches of grass in front of the Eiffel tower where everyone sets down their blankets and takes selfies is littered with Heineken bottle caps and cigarette butts, it was so uniformly covered in the things that I took a picture of it to remind me. I sort of got that Heineken and smokes are super popular there (at least amongst the touristy areas) but still.
May be the non-touristy areas are also considered dirty by you, but I'm an American, where we treat public places like shit but make sure interiors and the entrances near parking is pretty and the rest of the fucking street is trash since no one other than me apparently walk it. To me, the "grime" I see seems normal if not a little nicer than any city in Ohio.
My city (Oslo, Norway) also has buildings that are centuries old, but they are kept clean. When I went to Stockholm a couple of years back, their old buildings looked dirty because no one seemed to be cleaning them.
I am a man as well. Not sure how that has anything to do with male privilege lol. I still felt very unsafe. All kinds of people walking on the streets at night. Also all the terrorist attacks make it quite uncomforting too. If youve been to London you would be amazed at the condition of the buildings, the way the scaffolding is all done, how stuff under construction looks like. Its probably the most well organized city in the world, and Ive been to NY, Vegas, and all European big cities.
I lived in Paris 9 years from 2000 to 2009, then lived abroad and I currently live in the south of France.
I have to admit that when I went back to Paris 2015, the one thing that struck me was the dirt on the buildings like "le Louvres"'s musueum façade on the Rivoli street. It looked almost black. I actually did not really notice when I lived there, maybe it worsen.
Also I agree with you that Paris is a dirty city and London (at least the tourist areas) is much cleaner. There are a lot of incivilities in France and cleaning services are not known for their efficency.
As for safety, I also agree even if I have read that there has been many knife or moped attacks in London recently.
I've been living there for a while now and as much as there good things about London, being clean is absolutly not one of those... Unless you stay in the really wealthy areas. Where I live the really few public trash are never emptied, their content being scattered by foxes every night and people tends to discard their take away boxes on the pavements and roads where it stays for quite a while.
The stones being dirty is another issue. A lot of white stone will get darken by car pollution really quickly and cleaning those is a never ending process until fossil fuel is completely banned. The speed at which the the stone will get dirty as the the price of cleaning it wihtout damaging it differs a lot depending on the type of stone. I know that around the Loire valley, cleaning tuffeau is a huge pain.
I was about to write the same thing. I lived in Paris and now in London. Often residential streets are disgusting and smelly because people just leave their trash bags there out in the street.
Talking about stones, you can easily see the dark layer of pollution on bricks as well.
Talking about the Loire valley, I lived in Tours also and It's true that this is very difficult to clean, if I'm correct the best technique is to use a laser but it's slow and expensive.
Odd, I live in London and visited Paris last year, walking around the centre and saying near Monmartre. Paris certainly didn't feel noticeably unkempt to me.
